UFOs (UAPs): Explanations?

Discussion in 'UFOs, Ghosts and Monsters' started by Magical Realist, Oct 10, 2017.

  1. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    Actual evidence against mundane explanations?? That's amazing! You mean like a piece of alloyed hull-metal? An engine component we can't identify?? What is this actual 'evidence against mundane explanations' you speak of?
     
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  3. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    What about extraordinary maneuvers like sudden stops and changes in direction in mid air at supersonic speeds? Cmd Fravor described them as moving like ping pong balls. What mundane objects can explain that?
     
    Last edited: Nov 22, 2022
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  5. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    I knew my last post would attract you. You always appear defensively when you think "skeptics" are being criticised.

    UAPs/UFO's in the context of your own posts in this thread (and Mick's many sarcastic comments in the Skeptical Inquirer). And your own phrase "claims of the paranormal". You used it yourself in the quote immediately above.

    I'm still not sure what the word "paranormal" means in your mind or why it is so intolerable that somebody else might believe in whatever it is.

    I've never met "the average skeptic", but I think that my remarks are quite accurate regarding the ones I encounter here and on the pages of Skeptical Inquirer. Skeptic magazine once featured a slightly more open mind than its rival, though I sense that's changed in the last ten years as it's grown less philosophical and more strident. Skeptics as I encounter them are people who make it their primary business to attack other people's beliefs.

    My point is twofold. First, the movement "skeptics" are misusing the word 'skeptic'. And second, I hope to point out their hypocrisy, in how they are all about debunking other people's beliefs, while rarely if ever applying the same critical scrutiny to what they themselves believe.

    I still don't know precisely what you mean by the word 'paranormal', or what you are quite explicitly accusing me of there. I've probably made a couple of hundred posts in this thread and I challenge anyone interested to find a post where I used the word 'paranormal' or argued for it, whatever it is. (Actually, I think I might have used the word a couple of times, but in the context of disagreeing with others who used the word.)

    My own position (stated repeatedly) is more along the lines of opining that this "normal" reality that we all inhabit is less understood than most people imagine. My view is that the unknown is always present, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.

    Well, if much of the reality around us is poorly understood, it isn't unreasonable to think that reality might sometimes surprise us with things that we don't expect.

    Right. We all, self-styled "skeptics" included, have a set of faith commitments. Scientists do it just like everyone else. They have faith in mathematics, in reason and in objective reality, beliefs that I doubt any of them can satisfactorily justify in non-circular fashion.

    I certainly have my own faith commitments in that regard, a whole set of beliefs that I consider highly credible and as close to certain as a human being is likely to get. I expect that my faith commitments are very close to yours, actually. The difference is that I'm willing to look at them with a critical eye.

    I take that willingness to be the essence of real skepticism. It's a reflective-awareness that our movement "skeptics" seem to me to lack. So they aren't really skeptics at all in my opinion, they are just another variety of true-believer who happen to firmly believe that they know "woo" when they see it and that it is to be battled wherever it appears. The similarities to some of the more disagreeable aspects of the Abrahamic religions should be obvious. (At least heretics are now flamed on the internet, not at the stake, a vast improvement.)

    You still haven't clarified what you mean by "paranormal" or why you include UAPs/UFOs in that category. You need to do that.

    Context is important, James. I was responding to Wegs. She was talking about the new NASA UAP committee. I was just saying that if that committee approaches their task as the suppression of what they already firmly believe is "woo", then the whole exercise to understand the phenomenon is likely to be an intellectual failure. Surely you aren't going to argue with that?

    One could say the same if the NASA UAP committee begins with the firm belief that UAPs are alien spacecraft or divine visitations, and that the committee's task is to convince the public of that.

    It's a very similar mistake either way: to approach an unknown phenomenon with the assumption that one already knows what it is.

    No. I'm quite intentionally posting in his defense. I consider MR a longtime friend. MR would be the first to agree that we don't agree on everything. But he's still a friend and I don't like seeing my friends bullied and used as punching bags. I come to their defense and try to make the bullying a little more difficult.

    Besides, MR and I do fundamentally agree that reality is deeper and more mysterious than most people seem to think. So we resonate together at that point.

    Yes I do. They have access to many observation reports that haven't been made public. And they have access to all of the intelligence assessments that have been made about those reports.

    You must be aware that the UAP Preliminary Assessment is basically just an unclassified summary that accompanied a much longer classified report made to the Congressional committee that requested it. According to those that have seen it, that classified report contained many detailed studies of individual UAP reports. The reason why it's classified (apart from the government's hugely anal tendency to classify everything) is that some of these reports reveal technical details about the capabilities of radars and other detection media. (Some UAPs seem to have been detected by satellites.)

    I'll probably give the NASA UAP committee's report (and whatever reports the military and intelligence people produce) more credence than the opinions of our self-proclaimed "skeptics", for the reasons given above. But like I wrote earlier, I'm a fallibilist and I don't believe anything with absolute certainty. There's always the possibility of being wrong.
     
    Last edited: Nov 22, 2022
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  7. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    Seemingly extraordinary maneuvers...

    There are myriad factors that can result in the appearance of unusual movement in distant objects.
     
  8. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    Publicly-posted claims



    Do you think people just post whatever their claims are on a public forum and it's a bad thing to hold them to account? Do you know how discussion forums work?
     
    Last edited: Nov 22, 2022
  9. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    I’m not advocating for aliens operating the tic tac “aircraft;” I’m saying that West is too quick to speculate everyday occurrences like weather balloons and commercial jetliners as more likely than none of that being likely true (those speculations were refuted by the Pentagon), and we simply …don’t know.

    I’ve posted frequently in this thread, that I don’t believe space aliens are visiting Earth (or even exist), so I don’t know why you’d post that’s what I’m suggesting? Remember, when referring to mundane occurrences, I’m thinking common/everyday…”nothing to see here.”

    It could very well be that the tic tac flying object is extraordinary technology that we simply have never seen or experienced, before — human-made. West would rather we believe that those seasoned pilots were merely mistaken as they followed around and were mesmerized by, a weather balloon or commercial airliner. lol

    West isn’t really any different than a zealous UFO “hunter” who wants their answers to fit with their bias.
     
    Last edited: Nov 22, 2022
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  10. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    Yes he is.

    Again, there's nothing wrong with being biased toward the mundane. It's the default stance of any rational person. It comes back to
    - "it's not a thing until it's a thing"
    - "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"
    - the null hypothesis

    If we weren't biased toward the mundane, we would literally all go running into the woods every time some farmer claimed he saw a unicorn out behind the bar. You know perfectly well your inclination is to say "I think I'll wait for something a little more compelling than that." So, why does it get a pass just because it's in the sky?
     
  11. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Name some..
     
  12. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    We've been over this so many times. You claim to have researched UAP cases - you cannot have done so without coming across myriad factors that result in apparently unusual motion.

    Parallax (motion of the observer), camera gimballing, tracking and zooming, radar glitches, etc. All these factors, and many more, can manifest as unexpected motion in the right circumstances.

    Heck, sometimes it's just straight up lies. Sometimes what is mundane movement (say, moving in a circle) is spectacularized by bad faith believers as "movement impossible by conventional craft."
     
  13. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    None of those account for the apparent stopping and starting abruptly and sudden changing directions at high speeds that Fravor describes as like ping pong balls. Try again?
     
  14. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    That's your uninformed opinion, and you'd have to defend it.
    Until you show it can't be any of the things listed - or the myriad things not listed - there's just no there there.
    As you well know.
     
  15. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    Shouldn't the null hypothesis be "I don't know"?
     
  16. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    IOW..you got nothing. How did I guess..
     
  17. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    "I don't know" is not a hypothesis. It would be a conclusion.

    The null hypothesis (indeed, any hypothesis) is the starting point of an analysis, not the end.
     
  18. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    I don't have to have anything except a healthy skepticism and an understanding of how the world works.
    I'm not making claims that need to be defended.
    I'm simply saying these things can't be ruled out.
    If you say they are ruled out, you have to defend that.
    And you can't.

    The onus lies on the claimant.
    As you well know.
     
  19. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    I'm not claiming anything. I'm simply presenting the evidence for an unknown object. You otoh are claiming it is a known object. So the onus is on you to state what that is and why we should believe you over those who witnessed it.
     
    Last edited: Nov 22, 2022
  20. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    Good, then you're not claiming that parallax or gimballing or radar glitched can't account for them. And you're perfectly comfortable with proposed explanations that don't require the imagining of hypothetical advanced technology.

    No I am not. You really must read more carefully.
     
  21. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    No..I'm claiming it is an unknown object that defies anything known and that parallax or gimballing or radar glitches can't account for because it was seen with the naked eye. That's why it is called a UAP.
     
    Last edited: Nov 22, 2022
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  22. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    How does a “null hypothesis” work in the case of the tic tac object if after careful research and examination, we still don’t have any idea how to identify it?

    I don’t understand the “chance” part of a null hypothesis?
     
  23. DaveC426913 Valued Senior Member

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    That is a claim.

    And it is a claim you have been unable to defend.

    Note that the list I provided was not exhaustive. I said there are myriad ways that mundane factors that can make appear like unusual behavior. Your claim doesn;t stand unless you can rule them all out.

    (Just one answer - as I have pointed out - is the attempt to pass an outright lie, where a Believer claims some motion is "impossible by conventional craft". That particular lie is a documented fact, right here in SciFo. Do you want me to reference it?)
     

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